Hey CPP: took you out of TBOB cuz you trashed it without ever mentioning that you used to email me all the time until I told you to eff off. I just thought it was dishonest. You came off like a spurned lover in that piece. But seriously, good luck with your red-hot career.

Charlie Pierce ("CPP") wrote:A friend passed along a Tweet from the reinventor of sportswriting in which he sends along some holiday cheer to This Blog. (Apparently, there are more, but This Blog has more to do than clean up after children who spill their juiceboxes all over the Intertoobz.) And right back at you, you mendacious, whiny little thin-skinned bag of breeze, you. I've been thrown out of better joints than your bibliography. And, really, such language. The good Fathers on Mt. Saint James would not be pleased, old son. For the record, even if the facts alleged in that Tweet were true, and they're not, as we shall see, I mean, honestly, one not entirely bad review and you change your bibliography? Oh, Bill, you beast. I may not recover. Caddy, my fainting couch.

As to the Tweet itself, he's been running this rap all over the Intertoobz for a couple of years now, and he even got Jason Whitlock to believe it, which is a damned shame. Years ago, when he was still writing for Digital City, a friend gave This Blog his anti-sports-talk-radio screed, which it read and liked a great deal. We started an e-correspondence that was perfectly amiable. Then, at one point, right around Lebron's first year in the league, he fired off a pig-ignorant crack about Lebron's mother and the circumstances of Lebron's birth. This Blog sent him an e-mail saying, essentially, wow, that seemed a bit harsh. He replied with some snarkery and This Blog replied by telling him to "stay out of the deep end of the pool" until he'd actually learned how to report something. That was the last e-mail we ever exchanged.

Since then, he's been trafficking in the notion that he told This Blog to intercourse off because he was resisting its attempts to "mentor" him. (That's what he sold Whitlock. Pimp Hand, give us a call, man!) This is all my granny. This Blog had no intention of "mentoring" him because, to his credit, he was making his name in a new medium with which This Blog was not familiar, and because, if This Blog were going to mentor someone, it would pick someone with more intellectual integrity who was a helluva lot tougher. This Blog would be perfectly willing to explain this all to his face, including its genuine admiration for much of what he's accomplished, but, given his history in such matters, it fears it may die an unfulfilled blog in this regard.